Living Wittily

Here is love vast as the ocean.....

 Not had a poem here for a while. Looking over a few photos taken off the Moray Coast (the day we saw the pod of dolphins), they made me wistful with inward hard to name longing. The sea does that to me. Maybe it's the rhythm of the waves, the play of light, my own smallness gazing at immensity.

Keats was a Romantic poet - I'm not sure how much credible currency he carries in a culture that can be crudely unromantic about the natural world. But his words place me in front of the sea, insist that I look and listen, and be startled back into a deeper perception of who I am, what life is really for, and why being a human being capable of such reflective thought and self knowing humility in front of a vast gentleness of dangerous power, is a reminder of the truth at the centre of all existence, including my own - "Fear not, I have called you by name, you are mine....when you walk through the waters they shall not overwhelm you...... ".

On the Sea John Keats

It keeps eternal whisperings around
Desolate shores, and with its mighty swell
Gluts twice ten thousand caverns, till the spell
Of Hecate leaves them their old shadowy sound.
Often ’tis in such gentle temper found
That scarcely will the very smallest shell

Be moved for days from whence it sometime fell
When last the winds of heaven were unbound.
Oh ye! whose ears are dinned with uproar rude
Or fed too much with cloying melody -
Sit ye near some old cavern's mouth, and brood
Until ye start, as if the sea nymphs quired!

 

Anguished Protestants and Grumpy Catholics - according to Von Balthasar

Here's one of my favourite theologians putting miserable Christians and arid theology in their place:

How could Christianity have become such a universal power if it had always been as sullen as today's humourless and anguished Protestantism, or as grumpy as the super-organised and super-scholasticised Catholicism about us?...It is not dry manuals (full as these may be of unquestionable truths) that express with plausibility for the world the truth of Christ's Gospel; it is the existence of the saints who have been grasped by Christ's Holy Spirit. And Christ himself foresaw no other kind of apologetics."

Hans Urs Von Balthasar, The Glory of the Lord. 1. A Theological Aesthetics, Seeing the Form, (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1982), 493-4

Larkin, Vivaldi, Monet and a walk in the park

Walked in the park yesterday and found myself looking for signs of life on the trees.

No joy. Too early.

It was around 4.00p.m. and still light.

Yet felt as if something was being signalled.

Nearly a month after the shortest day.

And in that month all but unbroken cold.

Wanting it to be Spring doesn't make it so.

But in anticipation here's Philip Larkin.

THE TREES

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

and we grow old? No, they die too.

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

......

This should be read just before listening to Vivaldi's Spring Suite....and then read again as it finishes.

Yes.

Honestly.

Try it. 

Oh, and then admire a Monet!

Evelyn Underhill on Intercession

The great intercessor must possess an extreme sensitiveness to the state and needs of souls and of the world. As those who live very close to nature become tuned to her rhythm, and can discern in solitary moments all the movements of her secret life, or as musicians distinguish each separate note in a great symphony and yet receive the music as a whole; so the intercessor…is sensitised to every note and cadence in the rich and intricate music of common life. He stretches out over an ever wider area the filaments of love, and receives and endures in his own person the anguish of its sorrow, its helplessness, its confusions,  and its sin; suffering again and again the darkness of Gethsemane and the Cross as the price of redemptive power. For it is his awful privilege to stand in the gap between the world’s infinite need and the treasuries of the Divine Love.

Evelyn Underhill, An Anthology of the Love of God, (Lobndon : Mowbray, 1953), 162-3.

Imaginative, theologically sensitive, a practical mysticism of intercession as love for the other and as redemptive activity. Writing like this is one reason Evelyn Underhill remains a spiritual writer whose work expands our sense of God, and helps us notice His work in our lives.

Thomas Merton on the humility of the theologian who dares to write about God

I wish I could write better out of respect for God, who gave me these small and very usual and familiar and unstartling and generous graces...

But if I am humble I will write better just by being humble. By being humble, I will write what is true, simply - and the simple truth is never rubbish and never scandalous - except to people in peculiar perplexities of pride themselves...

May I write simply and straight anything I ever have to write, that no dishonour come to God through my writing about Him.

Thomas Merton, quoted in Michael Mott, The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton (London: Sheldon, 1986), 191

John Donne's pun on the end of God

John Donne and Julian of Norwich couldn't be more different in temperament, spirituality, lifestyle and life circumstance. But every time I read this sentence from Donne, I hear clear echoes of Julian's confident assurance in the eternal constancy of God's love: “whom God loves, he loves to the end and not to their end and their death, but to His end, and His end is that He might love them more”.

Cheap paperbacks aren't made to last, and I confess I don't have many of those glue-split, spine-peeling, brown-edged, once-read books that weren't supposed to stay important after that first read. But sometimes in a bundle of other people's discards one turns up that your haven't read. Like a Fount paperback on preaching by Colin Morris, Raising the Dead. And on page 55 is a paragraph that is really a theological expansion of Donne's pun,  that in turn echoes Julian's theological optimism:

"Those who have known the love of God last as long as his love lasts. For whatever we make of Jesus, its fair to say he died to show us that whoever we are, we matter to God. And since by definition, God must be perfectly consistent, there can never be a time when we cease to matter to him. Therefore we must be the objects of his love eternally. If God loves us, he must love us till the end, not our end but his end, and since God has no end, in the sense of ceasing to be, he must love us eternally."

Of course Donne was playing with the word "end" - God's end is also God's purpose, which is equally constant since grounded in eternal love. I mention all this because of what Morris goes on to say about the preacher and such doctrines as the love of God and the resurrection of Jesus:

Now for the preacher to be diffident about such doctrines in a time of despair and confusion is much more serious than false modesty; it is a dereliction of duty.

To reiterate yesterday's blog - quite so!

Pencil Notes in the margin: Kathleen Norris

"The operation of the church is entirely set up for the sinner, which creates much misunderstanding among the smug".
(Flannery O'Connor, quoted in Kathleen Norris, Acedia and Me, page 54)

"We are not our thoughts. Thoughts come and go. Unacompanied thought pass quickly. Thoughts that are thought about become desires. Desires that are thought about become passions".  (Mary Funk, Thoughts Matter, Norris, page 91)

For the theological joy of it...

The Christian religion is identical with Jesus Christ;
if there is no accessible Christ, there is no Christianity.
It is the Church's being to trust in Christ;
it is her vocation to bear witness to Christ;
if the shadow of uncertainty falls upon Christ,
her testimony is paralysed,
the breath of her life is withdrawn.

(James Denney, British Weekly, Nov 6, 1902)

As always, Denney saw to, and got to, the heart of things. And for him the heart of things is Christ,  and Christ crucified and risen. Decided I need to read some of Denney again, this time not as research, but for the theological joy of it. Good phrase that - theological joy! Reminds me of a book by Edward Schillebeecx, I Am a Happy Theologian. I think it was Steve Holmes who pointed out the aptness of that title for any theologian serious about a vocation in theological reflection and thought. Just do it for the joy of it!

The Good Life - a life spent reading.........

Here's why I like Annie Dillard's writing. Apart from reinforcing my bibliophilic tendencies, her writing sends shafts of light into those corners of our experience we choose not to notice - till someone like her takes us by the scruff of the neck and points us in their direction.

Two of her books, Holy the Firm, and Teaching a Stone to Talk are examples of thin books that weigh a ton in intellectual and spiritual freight. meantime, here she is making me feel better about the time I spend reading. 

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading - that is a good life.

('The Writing Life', Annie Dillard, in Three by Annnie Dillard, San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1990, page 569)

A J Heschel: Sincere intensity and intense sincerity

The elephant is a bonny bird,

it flits from bough to bough;

it makes its nest in a rhubarb tree

and whistles like a cow

Nonsense verse, when considered sensibly, usually has some plausible reference to sense! In this case, I realise that, judging from my blogging posts, it must look like my reading pattern flits from book to book. I haven't abandoned Rob Warner's Evangelicalism book -but I was, as promised, ambushed by Moltmann's In a Broad Place, and I'm too much of a Moltmann fan to allow any discipline or prior commitments to keep me from reading it undistracted. I'd just finished it when I was ambushed again - this time by the arrival of Edward Kaplan's second volume of his biography of A J Heschel, entitled Spiritual Radical. My enthusiasm for this Hasidic philosopher, rescued from the Holocaust by immigration to the US, who combined social justice with mystical piety, and who wrote some of the most sublime prose poetry about the reality of God, will be well enough known to regular readers of Living Wittily.

So again I am sidetracked by a book about someone who is anything but a sidetrack on my spiritual and intellectual journey. Here are a few sentences from some of Heschel's earliest writing in English:

Prayer takes the mind out of the narrowness of self-interest, and enables us to see the world in the mirror of the holy. For when we betake ourselves to the extreme opposite of the ego, we can behold a situation from the aspect of God.

Faith does not spring out of nothing. It comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence. Suddenly we become aware that our lips touch the veil that hangs before the Holy of Holies. Our face is lit up for a time with the light from behind the veil.  Faith opens our hearts for the entrance of the Holy. It is almost as though God were thinking for us.

In the realm of faith, God is not a hypothesis derived from logical assumptions, but an immediate insight, self-evident as light. To rationalists He is something after which they seek in the darkness with the light of their reason. To men and women of faith He is the light.

Such sincere intensity, and intense sincerity; reading the story of Heschel's life, and pausing over words forged and glinting in such mystic fire, I sense the shallowness and emotionalism of what we evangelicals call 'the devotional life. And I further sense the misguided rationalism of many forms of Evangelical apologetics, as if the reality of God, the God who burns with Holy Love revealed in Christ, could be proven into existence by ensuring we were working with the right epistemology. The immediate experience of a Holy God demands self surrender not self indulgence, adoration not argument.